AllFreeNovel
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I felt his anguish.
I patted his knuckles with commiseration.
“You know…Ily isn’t really a name.” I sighed with all the love I had for my brother. “Krish misread the note my birth mother left pinned on my baby blanket.” Hot tears prickled before fading beneath love again. “It was just a short note. A scribble really.”
Henri didn’t speak but he did go achingly still.
His palm suddenly tipped up and captured my fingers, fisting me in a painful handhold.
I didn’t know if he squeezed me to make me stop or squeezed me because he needed to know. Either way, this story would probably shatter him.
I’m sorry…
I recited the words scribed on my heart. “You’re perfect. But I’m not. And you deserve perfection. I.L.Y.”
Henri choked.
For a second, it looked as if he believed that sentence was about him—not the final parting phrase of my birth mother—but then his forehead creased, and he licked his lips. He whispered ever so quietly, “I.L.Y?”
“Krish read the note and in his six-year-old brain, he smushed the acronym together.”
Shadows gathered tighter around him. “Acronym?”
“It gives away my mother’s age. Shows she was probably a teenager stuck in a very bad place.”
He swallowed hard. His voice scratchy and raw. “What does it stand for?”
The fact that he didn’t know.
That he’d probably never been given those three little words even as a child.
Tragic really.
Terrible definitely.
But in the end, I’d been right.
Love was his greatest weakness.
Not me.
He thought it was me because each time he used my name, he mentioned the very thing that petrified him.
A surge of sleepiness.
A cloak of foggy night.
I snuggled deeper into the bed as I yawned. “I.L.Y.…it means I Love You.”
Henri leapt to his feet. “Quoi?” (What?)
“I love you…” I struggled to stay awake, a heavy anchor on my mind.
“You mean every time I use your name, I’m saying I fucking love you?”
“Yep.” I nodded, the room swimming.
Yep.
